By Andy Ford, Unite NHS rep
The nursing strikes called by the Royal College of Nursing on December 15 and 20 were a tremendous success.
Thousands of nurses at over 68 trusts in England (and there are only about 100) walked out in the first ever national strike called by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in its 106-year history. In fact, up until 2019, the RCN had a rule forbidding strike action as “unprofessional”. This was dropped to allow their members to take strike action in Northern Ireland over the failure to make any pay award whatsoever to NHS workers in the province, due to Sinn Fein and the DUP crashing the power sharing government, so that no-one could even make an NHS pay award.
From having been an organisation opposed to strikes, the RCN now finds itself at the forefront in the industrial challenge to a failed and incompetent Tory government.
RCN still not affiliated to the TUC
Despite looking very much like a professional body, with its ‘Royal College’ title, educational seminars and the prominence given to enforcing rules of conduct – rather than a working-class organisation – the RCN is actually the fourth largest union in the UK, with 483,000 members, bringing in an annual income of £52 million a year, according to the Certification Officer. It is the largest union which is still not affiliated to the TUC.
The nurses’ strike represents a political earthquake for the Tories, with a majority of the public seeing the justice of the nurses’ case, and quite correctly blaming the government for the state of the NHS. The Tories have struggled – but failed – to brand nurses as greedy wreckers holding the country to ransom, given their previous and politically expedient description of nurses as “angels” during the pandemic.
Nor can the Tories make it stick that nurses are ‘well paid’ already, given that a basic grade nurse or midwife will regularly have responsibility for half a dozen people’s lives for the princely sum of £27,000-£33,000 a year, just a quarter of what Boris Johnson was paid for his Daily Telegraph column, which by his own admission took him an hour or two a week to write. There are many validated cases of nurses resorting to foodbanks.
But if the RCN going on strike is a political earthquake, it was one prepared by a previous industrial earthquake that swept the union a couple of years ago, following the 3-year pay deal that was agreed in 2018. That deal was cooked up between the full-time officers of Unison and RCN and the Department of Health. No-one who actually had to work under the pay scales established by the 2018 deal would ever have come up with it.
2018 pay deal angered RCN rank and file
The 2018 pay deal fulfilled what was really a government wish list – a 3-year pay framework – 3% in the first year, 1.5% in Year 2, the same in Year 3, so it was very cheap to implement – and a (weird) form of performance-related pay. The deal was even worse for ambulance workers, many of whom saw their shift allowances slashed.
The problem was not so much that it was a bad deal. The real issue was how the RCN leadership oversold it to their members in their desperation to get them to vote for it. They echoed government propaganda that many nurses would get pay rises of “up to 28%”, whereas that only applied to a couple of dozen nurses on one single pay point. They failed to mention the element of performance-related pay; they skated over the fact that Years 2 and 3 were miserly below-inflation rises; and they told the nurses that they would be getting 3% in their pay straight away in July 2018 – which failed to arrive.
It was this last failure that tipped the RCN members over the edge. Furious nurses organised themselves in Facebook groups like ‘Nurses United’ and ‘Reject the NHS Pay Rise’ and collected the necessary number of signatures to convene an Extraordinary General Meeting.
The General Secretary, Janet Davies, who was closely associated with the deal, was forced to step down and an independent enquiry was commissioned to determine whether RCN officials had “misled” their own members. The whole fiasco ended with the entire RCN Executive Council resigning and being replaced.
All NHS workers deserve 20% to get back to 2010 levels
Janet Davies was replaced by Donna Kinnair, as a caretaker General Secretary, who was then replaced by Pat Cullen who had organised the RCN’s first ever strike in Northern Ireland. So, the process resulted in a bureaucratic leadership being replaced by one much more responsive to members, less wedded to an elitist outlook, and more prepared to use the strike tactic. This bears out Left Horizons’ perspectives – that even the most bureaucratic organisation is forced in the end to respond to its members.
The RCN have further strike days planned across 75 Trusts in England on January 18 and 19 and are talking about strike action perhaps needing to be “prolonged”. Under Pat Cullen, the RCN will not be the pushover it was in previous years. Their strong stance on nurses’ pay has solidified their membership and won them new members from other unions such as Unison.
There is a danger of the RCN being seduced by the Tories into a ‘nurses only’ deal that splits the NHS workforce, or a deal that promises jam tomorrow. Another idea recently floated, of a one off non-consolidated payment, is better described as a bribe pure and simple.
All NHS workers deserve and need a pay rise of around 20%, just to get back to the purchasing power of 2010. If this is not achieved, the service will continue falling apart at the seams as nurses and other workers “vote with their feet” and find jobs outside the NHS where they can earn more without the stress of long shifts, unpaid overtime and understaffed wards and clinics.
